No One Is Talking about This

Drawn from Lou Sullivan’s meticulously kept journals, this landmark book records the life of arguably the first publicly gay trans man to medically transition.

We Both Laughed In Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan narrates the inner life of a gay trans man moving through the shifting social, political, and medical mores of the second half of the 20th century. Sullivan kept comprehensive journals from age eleven until his AIDS-related death at thirty-nine. Sensual, lascivious, challenging, quotidian and poetic, the diaries complicate and disrupt normative trans narratives. Entries from twenty-four diaries reveal Sullivan’s self-articulation and the complexity of a fascinating and courageous figure.

Edited by: Ellis Martin and Zach Ozma
Introduction by: Susan Stryker

Practicing Dying is a literary anti-memoir documenting life in a Zen Buddhist monastery in rural France where the protagonist, a woman in her late twenties, attempts to overcome chronic drug addiction and mental illness. 

Broken and severely unwell, our protagonist arrives at the monastery from London: starving, drug-addicted and disillusioned, having exhausted every conventional treatment route available to her. The book examines how, habituated to a life of benefits assessments, petty-crime and sex work, she struggles to adjust to the rules, discipline and religious life of the monastery—at times to devastating and comedic effect. 

As the story unfolds, she reflects on her addictions and past experiences, raising critical questions about what it means to be "an addict" and why there may be vested corporate and societal interests in maintaining a narrow, individualistic understanding of addiction. 

Anarchic and provocative, tender and self-deprecating, Practicing Dying differs from other contemporary memoirs in the genre of addiction-recovery by simultaneously challenging the dominant narratives surrounding mental health while proposing an alternative approach to treating the “sickness of self” from which we all increasingly suffer. 

‘Practicing Dying is brilliant, rewarding and difficult. Northall offers the most brazen and shocking account of addiction I’ve ever read. Committing herself to the practice of Mahayana Buddhism, she eventually finds a way out, but only on the most rambling, circuitious path. Her account of addiction and loss, displacement and grief is profound and it proves that nothing is ever one thing.’ — Chris Kraus, author of The Four Spent The Day Together

Charlotte Northall is a London-based writer. Her debut, Practicing Dying, blends autobiography and cultural criticism to explore addiction, capitalism, and spiritual practice. She works with rough sleepers, supporting those living with addiction and complex mental health needs.

Oh oh this is the first issue of Tongue Ring, a journal of experimental writing in English & French, with original contributions and translations of texts* by Ariana Reines*, CAConrad*, Camille Kingué, Kaur Alia Ahmed*, Rafael Moreno, Taos Bertrand, and Théo Robine-Langlois*. 

Vous voyez, c’est ça mon genre. Je ne sais pas ce que c’est. 
Mais c’est mon genre. J’ai cet esprit en moi—qui est très ému
par la féminité. Je pourrais me mettre à pleurer. Je veux poser
mon manteau par terre pour la laisser marcher dessus
—Ariana Reines

Premier numéro de la nouvelle revue fantastique et bilingue (FR + EN) d’écriture expérimentale Tongue Ring, avec des contributions originales ainsi que des traductions* de textes de Ariana Reines*, CAConrad*, Camille Kingué, Kaur Alia Ahmed*, Rafael Moreno, Taos Bertrand, and Théo Robine-Langlois*. 

A collection of interrelated short stories by Lucy McKenzie and Alan Michael. First published in private limited edition, it was intended as a cheap holiday read to titillate and entertain summer visitors to the Mediterranean island of Stromboli, and as a piece of site-specific work; the location of the action and the place in which it is read being the same.

The visual art subsequently generated by Unlawful Assembly includes work by Josephine Pryde, with whom the artists collaborated to produce this second edition’s cover image.

A partly autobiographical novel that the German surrealist artist and author Unica Zürn (1916-1970) wrote for her ten-year-old daughter in 1953, although it would never be published in her lifetime. This is the first translation of the tale from German into English.

Unica Zürn tells the story of fifteen-year-old motherless Katrin, an aspiring writer, who lives with her father, also a writer. The novel is set in an imaginary world, a metropolis called Linit, split into three levels: Oberstadt (Hightown), Mittelstadt (Middletown) and Unterstadt (Lowtown), overlooked by a Volcano where the artists live and crossed by the river Emil. Presented as a book for children, apparently written for her own daughter (named Katrin), Katrin also draws on the personal biography of Zürn herself, in terms of her relationship with her father and the city of Berlin after WWII, and her experience with people on the margins of a society characterised by great tensions.

About Unica Zürn 
Nora Berta "Unika" Ruth Zürn, originally known as Ruth, was born on 6 July 1916 in Berlin. Raised in Berlin, Zürn had a contentious relationship with her mother, while she idolized her absent father. While at school she published her first short stories in magazines for young people, and in 1933 she began to work at the UFA film studios in Berlin (acronym for Universum-Film Aktiengesellschaft, a major German film company producing and distributing motion pictures from 1917 until the end of the Nazi era). In 1942 she married and had two children, Katrin and Christian. Shortly after, she lost the custody of her children. For the next few years she survived by writing short stories for newspapers and radio plays. After the war, she became part of the Bohemian group of Berlin and began to call herself Unika (after her aunt Unika Pudor). She frequented the artistic milieu revolving around the DADA-surrealist cabaret Die Badewanne ("The Bathtub"). In 1953, Zürn met the artist Hans Bellmer, best known for his disassembled dolls in unconventional poses directed at the cult of the perfect body then prominent in Germany, and became his muse. They lived together in Paris for many years, albeit in a conflictual relationship. Zürn concentrated on producing poetic anagrams supplemented by drawings, thus developing her own multidimensional surreal style. From the late 1950s, she suffered from forms of anxiety, later diagnosed as schizophrenia, and produced a wealth of remarkable textual and visual material while in psychiatric institutions across Germany and France. From 1956 to 1964, Zürn had four solo exhibitions of her drawings, and her work was included in the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme. The exploration of the unconscious dimension would increasingly lose its liberating, positive aspect and turn into a fixation on a narrow space, one in which the self is tormented by distressing visions. Her psychological difficulties inspired much of her writing, especially Der Mann im Jasmin (The Man of Jasmine, published in English in 1971). Other published texts by Zürn include Hexentexte (1954) and Dunkler Frühling (Dark Spring, 1967). Zürn died on 19 October 1970 in Paris, throwing herself from the sixth floor.